Finished my homebrew CNC router a couple weeks ago and I think I have it and MACH3 tweaked and ready to go. First question after all the construction dust settled was "now what to cut?".
Tried downloading a line-art drawing of an aircraft and converting it to a .dxf with a program called WINTOPO (
http://wintopo.com/ ). This worked - I was able to open the resulting .dxf in TurboCAD and it looked fine. I then converted to to GCODE with ACECONVERTER, and I was able to then load it's resulting file into a CNC Simulator and did a dry run. All seemed well so I loaded it into MACH3.
It cuts OK, but the path is wild and makes no logical sense. In this aircraft drawing it'll cut a bit of the prop - then head over and cut a small section of tail, then maybe a portion of a wheel....in short it wastes a lot of time. Again - the end result is OK but it must take 5x longer than it should an puts a lot of miles especially on the X axis.
You can see the craziness in the Tool Path window of MACH3. It's so cluttered that you can't even make out the basic outline of the plane.
Is this a common problem an danyone know of a fix? I've spent considerable time doing my homework in order to learn a way around this with no luck. Note that I'm new to all this so please don't assume any knowledge - or common sense for that matter - on my part.
Thanks for any tips -